Abstract

When analysing Great War commemoration one hundred years after the event, it is difficult not to refer to its successor, since the Second World War arose out of the instabilities created by the Versailles settlement. This chapter will examine if the two world wars can be regarded together as a 'second Thirty Years' War' that has eroded belief in European national identities and enabled the rise of global and regional identities, in which the politics of reconciliation and restitution replaces that of marital realpolitik. In many countries the commemorative rituals of the First and Second World Wars are the frame through which the sacrifices of all subsequent wars are recognized. But from another perspective, the wars laid the basis of a post-national world, creating first the League of Nations, then in 1945 the United Nations, organizations that sought to establish universal norms to regulate disputes within a new global system of nation-states.